Over on Mastodon a friend mentioned “Link dumps” which I thought were long gone. Back in the very early days of the Internet – pre-Y2K some websites were only this: a list of other sites the owner liked or found interesting – maybe they included opinions or maybe they didn’t but in the pre-social media, pre-algorithm days.
For a long time I hadn’t seen any of these and much of what I took in from the web was, in one way or another, sent to me with the help of an algorithm pushing it along. Maybe it was because it was promoted, maybe because lots of people argued about it, or maybe because it used the right keywords. The content I found this way often was engaging – it was chosen for that very reason, but it was in many ways predictable. If I read lots about bikes, the content I would get would be about bikes. Like one too many political posts and all of a sudden everything I was sent would be political – and often upsetting as a result.
The same is true for music. Like I’ve said before, when I was on Spotify I relied heavily on AI-generated lists. I never thought specifically “I want to listen to this.” but more like “I want something that’s good to exercise to – what do you think, based on what you know I like (and what people paid you to promote) I want to hear, Spotify?” And as you might imagine, it came to be very same-y. All of my early morning bike rides, for example, seemed to have mid to late 90s music like Groove Armada, Fatboy Slim or Chemical Brothers on it. Which was fine and for sure now when I hear these songs I fondly remember those rides.
Last night it was especially interesting. I had to meet a learner I’m tutoring downtown and took the subway which has no cell service for much of the way. My new music provider, Qobuz, isn’t like others I’ve had before which downloads things you’ve listened to lots recently to keep for offline use. I didn’t realize this so when the cell service went away the music stopped. And I had a moment where I felt a little overwhelmed by choice. Wait a minute, you mean I have to pick the albums and playlists I want to listen to when I’m in the tunnel? I can’t just say “Shuffle whatever you have?” It made me feel a bit weird to realize that I’d been conditioned away from “This is the music I’m on about these days” to “I dunno, probably you should tell me what I should consume.” A bit creepy, no? The result of all of this is I’m listening to more albums and more new music. Looking at last.fm my stats are surprising. Even though I’ve been tracking my listening there for most of the last 20 years, this week I listened to more new albums and songs. Interesting!
Online reading has been a bit of that as well with many of the articles I read coming from various social media outlets and a few newsletters. Lately I’ve added a few folks to my RSS reader who share link dumps or sites that publish interesting articles. Anything that looks interesting (along with the entries from blogs I like, articles I see that I want to read later – even offline in the subway with no service), I add to my Obsidian vault. As I read them if I read something interesting I can add a tag to it so that I can share it. Here are a few of the interesting things I’ve read lately:
Imagine a married couple – except neither of them speaks each other’s language. (subscription-free link here)
This one is funny – a week or so before I saw this I was imagining ways in which “Enshittification” could get worse: subscription-based bikes that you have to pay for extra gears, grocery stores with “members only” checkouts that go twice as fast as the others or charging a 10% surcharge for having a human cashier instead of a self-checkout. But the weirdest one I thought of was subscription-based translation in situations where it is essential for work or a relationship. I even thought of a couple using it and having to choose between spending money on essentials or having to forego anything but necessary conversations. We’re not there yet – and to be honest I didn’t think anyone had had a relationship supported by translation software but it’s happening – and if there’s one there are many.
I didn’t realize that soap bars were dying and that the younger generation thinks of them as unsanitary and prefer liquid soap and shower gels. Who knew? This article doesn’t just talk about that, it talks about some really fascinating history of how we got bar soap, and the idea of washing and cleanliness even became a thing. At least in the west it looks like it’s only a little over 100 years old!
OK for this one I need to give a bit of a tongue in cheek content warning. These days, thanks to menopause, Sage experiences hot flashes – some with triggers, others with no reason. One clear reason that she’s noticed, though, is getting upset/angry about something – and patriarchal nonsense is a great trigger for that. This article about women’s clothing sizes has lots of data and interesting visualizations. It’s really fascinating but also yet another example of how women may want or need one thing but culture and the market deliberately choose to deliver another, much more inferior thing. So there’s tons of interesting info but also it may make you angry at the same time. So while I sent most of the articles in this post to Sage, I only needed to tell her a couple of sentences about it before she was clear – that was enough.
As you might’ve seen if you’ve followed me on social media before or possibly even here in older blog posts, is that here in Toronto we have lots of coyotes. Riding my bike just before or after dawn I have often seen them. They aren’t really a threat to (fully grown) humans but there is definitely something a bit exciting and scary about seeing a wild dog, here often a larger coyote/wolf mix (a coywolf) out in the world. Here in North America many cities are learning to coexist with them. In this article, we learn a bit about how that is going and also some of how they’re impacting the ecosystem. One of the most interesting things was about how coyotes, through their eating of pet cats are helping songbird populations. We may think we live in cities and nature is outside the cities but we’re all still in that web.
There are many big differences between Asian and western cultures. One of the biggest people talk about is that there is much more of an emphasis on the individual in the west. In this article the author suggests that it might come down to what people are eating: bread versus rice – and what it takes to maintain a society in each condition.
I’m interested to see as I look for more discussion of algorithm-free life, that there are lots of folks already headed that way – enough that it’s being looked at as a trend. Of course many of the related articles I saw were all from marketers asking each other how they could leverage this into selling more things – not seeming to realize that much of why people are leaving algorithms behind is because at its heart it is insincere and geared to selling things.
What interesting things have you learned about this week?
